Antonina Aleksandrovna Voronina-Utkina Materials on Kazakh Ethnography in the MAE RAS Collection

This paper is the first one to give a full account of the collection of watercolours by Antonina Aleksandrovna Voronina‑Utkina. The watercolours were made during the 1913 ethnographic expedition to Karkaralyn Uezd, Semipalatinsk Region (in present‑day Kazakhstan), headed by Grigoriy Nikolaevich Potanin. The task that the young artist was assigned to do was to document traditional Kazakh ornaments through sketching various everyday items. Ethnographic sketching is a special genre. Antonina Aleksandrovna's watercolour sketches are very precise and accurate in their depiction not only of the colour scale and design of traditional Kazakh household items, but also of their texture and decor. Such watercolour images are a wonderful ethnographic source to study traditional life. The paper addresses the history behind this unique collection and examines how A. A. Voronina‑Utkina became an established and original artist, who devoted most of her life to expeditions.